Superluminal

by Tony Daniel

  “I wish I’d never left the ice mine, Mum,” the man told his weeping mother. “I thought I was heading for a better life, but instead I’m about to be deader than Bore Hole One on the old conglomerate.”

  And then the speed of his plunge caught up with him, and the soldier flared into a ball of horrible pain that lasted a lot longer than Elvis thought it would. Finally, there was darkness as the link was severed.

  Elvis checked the readout. This particular death happened several hours ago. Enough with the reruns; now it was on to the good new stuff—on to the fighting on Triton at the capital city of New Miranda!

  First for an overview.

  The siege had been going on for e-weeks. The nail rain had definitely softened up New Miranda, but it only lightly strafed the military targets on the outskirts of the city, and fallen mostly in the civilian sectors. While this was useful for undermining civilian morale, it wasn’t making the DIED invaders’ job much easier. What’s more, the Sciatica attack craft were still being engaged above the surface by a swarm of local ships. None of these were particularly suited to be military craft, but they’d all be retrofitted with weaponry and some defenses. There were so many of them that, even though hardly any were a match for a DIED ship, they could gang up three or four to an attacker and keep the craft busy. This was something that hadn’t happened during the attack on Io, where the DIED had enjoyed overwhelming orbital superiority.

  No need to worry , said the soothing voice of the Battle Day announcer. Paratroopers have slipped through planetary defenses and are making moonfall even now.

  Rip as all get-out , Elvis thought back at the announcer. Tune me in to that action!

  And he was there.

  There were three brigades that had made it to the surface so far, about thirty thousand soldiers. A third of them were elite, fully space-adapted troops. The others had come down in drop canisters. Those soldiers were establishing a beachhead and assembling armored rovers and tanks to carry them forward. The space-adapted, on the other hand, were deployed forward. Some were charging the fremdens’ defensive works and facing a merciless cross fire. Others had made it past the fremden artillery and were engaged with the enemy hand to hand.

  Elvis quickly selected the most popular personal combat playing at the moment.

  It was a brother and a sister—the sister a DIED soldier, her brother a fremden—locked in a deadly embrace. The woman had shot off her sibling’s left arm, then moved in to choke him. His pellicle, overwhelmed by the system failure, and the attack from the woman’s own grist, had not been able to seal up the blood flow from the man’s stump. So, while the woman couldn’t literally choke the air out of her space-adapted brother, she could hold him and swarm him with attacking grist while he bled to death into the broken methane snow surface of Triton.

  Each fighter had an icon floating over his or her head that contained their background information and the story of how two members of the same family had come to be fighting to the death on Neptune’s cold moon. Elvis skipped this part. That was girl stuff—the stuff that was supposed to get you all emotional and involved in the story. He found that it usually bored him. He was far more interested in the physical details of combat and the effects of the different weapons on flesh and blood.

  He quickly withdrew from full participation in the death match and scanned around for something a bit more grisly. He didn’t have far to look.

  A wave of DIED were charging an antimatter battery. They were in full stealth mode, invisible across a broad spectrum of the e-m spectrum. The fremden responded not by random, intense firing, but by using their gun in a deliberate “search” pattern. This was a pretty calm and cool maneuver, considering that hundreds of bloodthirsty soldiers were descending on them and many of these attackers were bound to get through. It was particularly interesting to get inside a fremden point of view. The artillery beams roared out over what seemed to be an empty field of fire until—every few seconds—a bolt would catch a DIED soldier and vaporize him or her in a magnesium-bright flash. Sometimes stumps of legs or arms remained, sublimating and sizzling, on the ground.

  The DIED first wave finally reached the ramparts. The fremden didn’t know what hit them until the last moment. It was as if the attackers stepped out of an empty plain and were suddenly there—and moving to kill. Elvis switched over to his own side’s POV.

  Fremden faces. Red agony. Terror in the eyes. Fear. Sometimes pleading. Sometime defiance.

  Sweep One, locate the comm nexus!

  To the right at one o’clock—the guy in the corner’s manning the feed!

  Point One and Two: Take him out.

  Point One, I’m on it!

  Point Two, ditto.

  Bullets and blood. No antimatter weaponry in these close quarters! Hands sharpened to knives. Punctured pellicles, explosive, bubbling decompression. Rapidly frozen internal organs shattering, spilling out like pottery shards. Red, frothing vomit.

  Take that, you fucker! You fucker, you’re going to die!

  Stay together and give me a fire radius!

  That’s right! That’s right! Turn your ass around and run! Won’t do you any good. Fremden bitch. Bad day to fuck with me!

  Silent screams.

  Battle Day is so rip , thought Elvis. Better than any game on the merci.

  He pulled back, had a look at the tactical layout. The host informed him that the fighting on the ground was intense, indecisive at the moment—although full DIED victory was expected.

  Farther back.

  The orbital battle dragged on, with lots of fire exchanged and the occasional explosive flare as someone or another took a direct hit. One big fremden tanker suddenly careened out of control and rocketed downward toward the lights of New Miranda. After a moment, there was a tiny explosion below that must have meant the death of hundreds of people.

  Utterly rip.

  Farther back.

  In space, outside of Triton’s orbit, the big ships were engaged: destroyer groups against the massive cloud-ships.

  The cloudships had sophisticated merci lockouts, so there was no getting inside their perceptive fields. But there were fremden soldiers aboard who could be v-hacked, and the show’s adept producers provided plenty of enemy POVs. There were a couple of space infantry battles going on, but for the most part, the fighting was ship to ship.

  The cloudships, for all their size, were quite nimble and could outmaneuver individual DIED ships under most circumstances. The key was to use the destroyer groups as a pack and take on the ships from several directions. That proved easier said than done, however. The cloudships, too, could and did work together.

  Elvis was particular attracted to the fierce salvos between the Aztec Sacrifice and Cloudships Cervantes and Homer. What was strange was that the two cloudships seemed to be fighting one another, as well as the DIED battle group. They were blasting away at one another with gamma ray bursts that burnt in neon green lines through Elvis’s filtered vision. His current vantage point was the Largemouth , a Dirac-class ship.

  Why are they fighting each other? he asked the Battle Day host.

  We’re not sure, but we think they’re using e-m bursts to communicate. As you know, our forces have the ability to jam the merci.

  Oh yeah, thought Elvis. The Secret Weapon. Director Amés and the Science Directorate had found a way to isolate local merci networks, to cut off the grist from communicating outside its physical area. Nobody knew how this magical feat was accomplished.

  Just another way Amés showed himself to be the best. Anybody not on his team was doomed to destruction. Elvis almost felt sorry for those poor fremden suckers.

  But they were getting what they deserved. They were the ones who started the civil war, trying to seal off the outer system and commandeer all the riches found there. And that after the Met had paid for the development of the colonies in the first place. It was stealing, and it was wrong. Amés wasn’t going to stand for it, and Elvis—like his parents, his br
other and sister, all his friends—was completely behind the Director.

  Make those ungrateful fremden send their fair share home—home to the Met and the inner system, where humans naturally belong, after all.

  Besides, everybody knew the outer system was crawling with out-of-control tagions. It was a jungle out there.

  The solar system must naturally be whole and under one government. That government obviously had to be the Interlocking Directorate.

  Couldn’t the stupid fremden see that? They must. They were just trying to raise a stink, to make trouble, and they were going to get punished for it. Punished really bad.

  But at the moment, the two enormous cloudships were holding their own against a pack of attackers. The Aztec Sacrifice group was trying to cut the ships off from one another, but whenever a DIED ship slipped into the gap separating the cloudships, she was subjected to withering, concentrated fire. In fact the cloudships resembled nothing so much as two galaxies—one a spiral, the other shaped like a disc, throwing off supernova-like bolts of lightning.

  One ship, the Malfeasance , took particularly heavy fire and veered away, her command and control structures shot away, and her massively breached hull trailing precious atmosphere into the empty vastness.

  But even as the Malfeasance departed, there was a nuclear ball of fire, momentarily brighter than the (admittedly wan) sun, and another ship raced past the cloudships and toward Triton, taking advantage of the momentary e-m overload. Yet the fremden had a third ship to contend with near the moon—Cloudship Mc-Carthy—and that ship had so far let no large DIED ship past him. Only the swarms of Sciaticas, flying long-range missions from the destroyers, were succeeding in reaching the moon’s orbit proper. But now another destroyer’s contingent of Sciaticas could be added to that armada.

  It was hard fought on every level—just the way Elvis liked it. The ratings poll popped up, and he couldn’t believe himself even as he voted.

  He’d given today’s show a perfect ten!

  He liked to think of himself as a very critical merci watcher. He’d absolutely never rated any show at ten before. He didn’t think it could happen. But Battle Day had done it. It was, hands down, the best show he’d ever seen on the merci.

  He prepared himself for the finale—the flare of Kid Glory that every Battle Day “warrior” received before he or she signed off. Elvis knew that this was only a pale shadow of the Glory the soldiers got to feel. But receiving it made him a part of it all—a DIED Special Agent, like the host said. Elvis had to admit that he could get pretty cranky when he missed his dose of Glory.

  “Elvis? Elvis Douri!”

  Damn. It was his mother. Elvis remained quiet and did not disengage from the rip-chair. Maybe she’d leave him alone for once instead of constantly butting into his business. But that was not to be.

  “Are you glued into the merci again?” Her voice was closer now. She’d overridden the lockout code he’d put on his room’s entrance. Total invasion of privacy!

  Even the rip-chair had to respond to her commands. Unfair! The cover slid away, and the boy-meat inside was exposed like a clam in an opened shell.

  “Mom!”

  “What are you plugged into?”

  “None of your business.”

  His mother shook her head ruefully. “It’s that Battle Day , isn’t it?”

  “So what if it is?” Elvis replied, defiant. “I’m only doing my duty as a good citizen.”

  “There’s too much violence on that show for a boy your age.”

  “And I suppose you can watch it all day if you want to?”

  “I’m an adult,” his mother replied. “And I don’t watch it all day.”

  “That’s because all you ever do is sit and watch the Glory channel with the intensity all the way up,” Elvis said. “You’re going to burn out your brains, Mom.”

  “What I do is my business,” his mother said. “What you do is also my business, and you’re spending too much time on the merci.”

  Elvis was fully disengaged from the virtuality now. His room was bright and clean, and the world was absolutely no fun anymore. “Maybe you should do more of your part in the war effort.”

  “More of my part…”His mother’s voice was incredulous. “Do you realize that your cousin is out there ? Do you have any idea what that means? Sometimes spending a few minutes on that Glory channel is all that keeps me from going crazy, I’ll have you know.”

  “It’s more like a few hours !” Elvis exclaimed.

  “Young man, you watch the way you talk to me.”

  “Well, I’m proud of Dory. Maybe she’ll even be on Battle Day sometime.”

  “Oh, Elvis.” His mother was crying now, for no discernible reason. At least he’d won this little victory, even though he had no idea how he’d done it. It was time to be magnanimous to his defeated foe.

  “I’m sorry, Mom,” he said. “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings again.”

  “You didn’t,” his mother said. “You couldn’t, Elvis. You don’t know what you’re saying.” Like usual, any statement his mother made that was meant to make him feel better had the opposite effect. He felt mad at her all over again.

  “Maybe I’ll be on Battle Day ,” he said, knowing as he said it that he would provoke another round of tears from his mother. “I sure hope the war lasts long enough so that I get a chance.”

  Now the tears flowed freely from his mother’s eyes. “You’re going to break my heart,” she said. “Just break it in two.”

  “Don’t worry, Mom. I’ll do really good out there.” He felt certain that he was right about this, and he spoke in his most reasonable tone. “After all,” Elvis continued, “nobody’s seen more episodes of Battle Day than I have. I’d be perfect for that show.”

  Thirty-one

  NEPTUNE SYSTEM

  E-STANDARD, MIDNIGHT, THURSDAY, APRIL 3, 3017

  NEPTUNE

  Corporal Alessandro Orfeo had never been to Neptune. Hell, he’d never even been to Pluto. He’d spent most of his nineteen years in the Kuipers, somewhere between Neptune and Pluto, digging for right-handed proteins. Not for the regular kind you could make in a lab, but for the exotics that it took nature millennia to cook up. Orfeo might not be able to read and write so well, but he goddamn knew his protein sequences as well as any man or woman living.

  He even understood why the stuff was so valuable: Enhanced into a modified form of grist, it was used to build important and delicate structures inside human bodies where regular left-handed protein would cause a perpetual immune reaction. It was a prime component in the really good Broca language adaptations, for example. And that grist was why everybody could speak to each other, despite almost everyone having a different dialect of Basis—practically down to the individual.

  Alessandro didn’t consider himself smart, but he sure wasn’t any dumb-ass cracker, as the miners were often portrayed on the merci shows. He had to admit that he laughed as hard as the next guy when he tuned in to those programs, though.

  The point was, he knew enough to know that he still had a lot of living to do. That his mother and father were going to really miss him, and his dad was going to have a hard time supporting his younger brothers and sisters without the half of Alessandro’s army paycheck that he sent back home.

  There was supposed to be a pension plan for KIAs, but who the hell could count on that? Hell, the war might be lost today, for all he would ever know.

  Most of all, he was smart enough to know that Isabella was going to find herself another boyfriend, and she and him weren’t going to get married after all.

  What a thing to be considering as your last thought. He had imagined lots of possibilities. Going out fighting, his mind in a white-hot rage. Or dying in the hospital, Isabella crying softly at his side.

  Instead, he’d just fucking missed the net.

  That was all there was to it. The net that was supposed to catch him hadn’t deployed. Something was wrong—a harpoon had missed or som
ething. Or he’d just fucking hadn’t seen it and had missed catching hold.

  Stupid way to go. Like falling toward that big blue planet and thinking about Isabella with another guy. Isabella raising kids that weren’t his kids. And grandkids. And all of his kids somewhere in heaven or purgatory or wherever little unborn baby souls got stuck when they were supposed to get a place, were expecting to get a place, and then they all got laid off and no work for any baby souls to be had.

  It was kind of funny and sad at the same time, thinking about those baby souls.

  Maybe that reincarnation stuff worked, and his soul would get to come back. Alessandro smiled at the thought.

  I know what I’ll do, he thought. I will come back as the soul of one of Isabella’s babies. There I’ll be sucking on her breasts all day while old Mario Whateverthefuck is off working his ass off to support us. And then when I get older I’ll just reach out and slug him one day. Slug him right in the face. And he’ll say what’s that for, son? And I’ll say it’s because you took my girl, you goddamn asshole.

  But babies never talk about their lives from before, and Alessandro knew that he sure as shit didn’t remember any past existence. You obviously forget everything if you get recycled as a soul.

  So I’ll get blanked, or I won’t get to come back at all. That’s how it’ll be. That’s what’s going to happen.

  And for some reason, this thought did calm him down. And he could take in the blue swirl below him. Too bad he wasn’t on the opposite side of the planet. He could look down straight into the Eye then. Stare down old Neptune. Or turn around and take a last gander at Triton—the only planet he’d ever stepped on. Even though it really was a moon and not a planet.

  There was one other option. He could go on the merci. He knew that was what most of the other guys were doing right then. Violating protocol and putting a call through to the ones they’d left behind. Most of them would die all tucked away in the virtuality. Only at the end, when the heat burnt through the skin, would the overrides kick in. Only for an instant would they be jerked back to the hell of reality. Then it would all be over.